I'm a long-time contributor with over 10,000 videos across major microstock platforms (Shutterstock, Pond5, Adobe, etc.), and like many of you, I�ve seen a steady decline in earnings � especially after recent changes at Shutterstock and the Pond5 acquisition.

I�m seriously considering launching my own Shopify-based site to sell directly to customers, with full control over pricing, licensing, and product presentation. I already have all my content fully keyworded and described from years in the industry, so I�d like to reuse that data to speed up the process.

I�d love to hear from anyone who has:
Set up a Shopify store for stock footage
Used tools like SkyPilot or SendOwl for digital delivery
Had success (or failure!) building direct sales

Advice on licensing models, pricing, or driving traffic
Do you think it's worth the effort? Or is it just another rabbit hole with little return?

What PCDMedia said above is absolutely true.

I set up a Shopify account for my husband a couple of years ago and thought it was a great site with lots of features. He had a lot of success with his shop - he wasn't selling photography but its the same principle. His success came from driving his buyers there from social media.

I know Steve Heap (long time stock contributor and author) has had a lot of success selling his photography as wall art directly and he also says that you have to do a lot of marketing and promotion. Steve's written a book about it, "Selling Your Fine Art Photography". I've read it and highly recommend it. Its very comprehensive.

I now sell books and also use social media to market them.

Basically what you have to do is find your 'audience'. Work out who your prospective buyers are, who need your type of imagery, and where they are. The thing about social media is, the advertisers (or people who need your type of stock photos) will follow where their target audience goes. For example, as a general rule, Tik Tok is for the younger generation, Pinterest is predominantly female, and family orientated.  Instagram is for millennials. Twitter (X) has changed a lot but it used to be for 35 - 55 yos. And Facebook is for mature audiences across the board. These are the largest percentage groups on each platform, but not inclusive.

For example, Steve was telling me that he sells best on Facebook, whereas I have targeted my food photography books to food bloggers, and sell best on Pinterest and Instagram.

Then there's pricing, which is always one of the hardest decision in any business, and lots to work out - but there's a lot of information out there that can help. So, the initial platform is not necessarily your main concern. I use Payhip to sell my digital products. Very simple to set up, they are a reputable site based in the UK and only charge 5% commission on sales on a free account. That's all I need, just somewhere to drive traffic. I also sell on Amazon, but have made more sales from my Payhip store because of my own marketing.

The most important thing, however, in selling direct, is how to drive the right traffic to your shop. Creating and setting up your products is the easy part, from there on, everything else is about marketing. How to set up posts that sell, having a budget based on a percentage of your sales for ads and promotions, and promote, promote, promote. (Which is basically what the agencies used to do for us)

Good luck!

ETA: this is my Payhip shop: https://payhip.com/MillefloreImages
It's also linked to my website where I can do all the promo and then send them to download with a 'Powered by Payhip' link. No plugins required. But its up to you how you want to manage downloads.

As everyone else already said, the hard part of selling direct is to get potential buyers to your website/shop. I also do sell occasional licenses directly to clients through my website. I use a pricing similar to premium agencies and I sell only RM licenses. No license is below 100 Euro. For that to work you also should offer premium quality images, which aren't readily available on cheap microstock sites.

Also if you don't mind getting a bit more technical with your website, you could use WooCommerce instead of Shopify - in most cases it is much cheaper (depending on the plugins you need, some need to be paid for).

Edit: you were asking about footage - I only sell images, but the same principle applies.

It's great to see everyone trying different avenues to escape the falling income from stock. I don't know how hard it would be to sell stock video. My experience of selling prints is to a totally different audience - wall art buyers rather than stock photo licenses, but with video, I'm guessing that it is the same people who either buy from a stock agency or now buy from you directly. I've often been amazed at the prices I get sometimes on Alamy for a stock photo license, when exactly the same photo is available for next to nothing on Shutterstock. So you have to contend with people having a business account with a site (Alamy in that case) and just not spending the time searching elsewhere because it is easier to just use the chosen agency. So I suspect selling stock video through your own site will be hard. But good luck!

Steve

Have you considered promoting your probably exclusive port on pond5 via social media?

Instead of building a webshop yourself, can you not develop a promotional social media strategy, with an interesting blog about your current production projects, get people to follow you and this way drive traffic to your portfolio?

That's a brilliant idea, because with an exclusive account, you can set your own prices. (or have they changed that too??)

I forgot to mention Youtube above as a good social media for video sales.

Well, even with the pricing change, is it not worth self promoting an exclusive pond5 webshop port?

Or what happened to photoshelter, or perhaps a different agency that gives you good royalty returns.

I would think it is always easier to build traffic via promoting an agency because for the customer there is more incentive to sign up.

Yes, they came for you, but if they sign up they have access to a large resource of content to browse from.

With my buyers hat that would always be more interesting than just one artist.

Just my two cents.

My videos on iStock are selling for pennies, which is disappointing. Haven't had any sales on P5 for a while.

Building own website is the easy part, driving people to it is the challenging bit, especially if you don't have any audience already.

I own 9 websites so far, and would be easy for me to build my own stock agency, actually had this idea as well, but you need a team, building something like that on your own is very time consuming and can be costly.

You can check my website below. From some of them I get donations from members or earning some money from ads, but these are nothing. My recent site is subscription based model business, which hopefully will take off.

Personal sites
My Travel Blog: https://finaladventurer.com
Buy My Prints: https://iskymedia.io
Photo Service Business: https://happyfeelings.co.uk
Film and Video Services: https://iskyvisuals.com

Forums
General Photography forum: https://explorness.com
DJI Pilots Drone Forum: https://dji-pilots.com
Macro Photography Forum: https://macroderie.com

Useful platform
Hosting and Sharing Platform: https://uavbbi.com